I want to reorganize years of tib backups to one location
I am on a quest to cleanup my stacks of external usb drives with years of Acronis backups from many different Acronis versions. I wan to consolidate all of them into one or more of the USB drives for archiving and also keep one USB for day-to-day use with a few of the tib files. . They are all "Full" backups, none are incremental backups. All are backups from a single desktop PC.
To prepare, I have first "removed" all references to backups under the "This Computer" heading in Acronis
Will the following plan work in Acronis 2018
1) to consolidate all tib files into one location for archiving I will copy (using Explorer) all tib files from multiple USB drives onto one USB external drive, call it USB1. Note all tibs are full not incremental
2) Next I want to rename the tbs on USB1 with easier logical names for future reference
3) Next I will create a 2nd USB drive for day-to-day use which will only contain a subset of the tibs, the more current ones. USB1 will get stored away and USB2 will be kept nearby and plugged into the computer when needed.
4) I will connect USB2 and use the Acronis "Add Backup" to add each of the tib files on USB2 to Acronis.
Comments, suggestions???
Will the following plan work in Acronis 2018
1) to consolidate all tib files into one location for archiving I will copy (using Explorer) all tib files from multiple USB drives onto one USB external drive, call it USB1. Note all tibs are full not incremental
2) Next I want to rename the tbs on USB1 with easier logical names for future reference
3) Next I will create a 2nd USB drive for day-to-day use which will only contain a subset of the tibs, the more current ones. USB1 will get stored away and USB2 will be kept nearby and plugged into the computer when needed.
4) I will connect USB2 and use the Acronis "Add Backup" to add each of the tib files on USB2 to Acronis.
- You should do a Validation of each .tib file before and after copying to the target USB drive. Validation does not guarantee that the files are good for use in a recovery but does check that the file has not be altered or corrupted by the copy process by verifying all the embedded checksum points within the file(s).
Personally, I would create a separate folder on the target drive to hold all the files from each separate source USB drive. This would group all related files together and also avoid any chance of accidentally overwriting any files from a different drive which may use the same file name.
- You should retain the same format of the file name, i.e. keep the _full_b1_s1_v1 part of the file names as this helps ATI to identify the correct sequence that files were created.
- Same comments as for 1. & 2.
- Use 'Add existing backup' to connect the .tib files with the ATI GUI - Add backup will create a new backup task unrelated to the existing .tib file. When adding existing files which are all related to the same source data, then you should only need to add the most recent file to allow the other related files to be shown as possible recovery points in the ATI GUI.
Steve's advice is spot on.
Also, I wouldn't reattach that drive to the system while Acronis is running after you've moved and named them. Otherwise, there's a good chance they're all automatically going to end up as "new" backups under my computer and have to be manually removed one by one again.
This is why I keep asking that it not scan all drives and automatically add backups. Instead it should ask the user which locations they would like to scan, disable scanning completely, or offer the option to scan everything and let the user choose. I've requested this in the 2019 wishlist sticky and hope others do too. ?